Internal Contestation Research Articles

"This is Not the 90s": Myanmar and Change in ASEAN's Normative Order

In this article, we examine the contours of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations' (ASEAN) response to the latest regional challenge from Myanmar, the 2021 coup. Scholars and practitioners alike often portray ASEAN as a relatively cohesive community of states united in adherence to a long-held and comparatively stable set of norms within the so-called "ASEAN way." Core among these norms has been domestic non-interference. However, we argue that rather than being determined by a coherent set of agreed norms, ASEAN's response to this crisis has been shaped by intra-regional contestation and division around how ASEAN ought to enact its particular "way" of regional governance. More narrowly, we show that the ASEAN response has been shaped by contestation over competing normative impulses in the organization—centrality and non-interference—which have developed in increasing tension since the humanitarian disaster after Cyclone Nargis in 2008 and the Rohingya crisis after 2016. We show that in response to these crises, officials from the organization and its member states advanced divergent accounts of what ASEAN ought to do and why, given competing normative commitments to centrality and non-interference. By showing how ASEAN's response to the 2021 coup is the result of internal contestation within the organization, we support accounts of regional governance in Southeast Asia that stress less the fixity of ASEAN norms than their contestation in practice. To make our argument we analyze more than 250 documents and draw on interviews with regional officials.

Contested Statehood and EU Integration: The Case of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract This article delves into the intricate relationship between contested state- hood and European Union (EU) integration, explicitly focusing on Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Since the early 1990s, amidst the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the EU’s enlargement efforts, BiH has grappled with challenges to its statehood, which have impeded its alignment with EU requirements. Despite being universally recognised as an independent state, BiH faces internal contestation, evident in its consociational constitutional framework and the divergent nationalist narratives among constituent groups. Moreover, while BiH maintains external sovereignty, it coexists with significant international oversight, complicating its path toward EU integration. The EU’s expansion into internally contested states like BiH necessitates a nuanced approach considering the entanglement of Europeanisation and de-Daytonisation processes. This article emphasises the complexity of BiH’s governance landscape, where internal dynamics and external influences converge, creating formidable obstacles to sovereignty assertion and governance efficacy. To surmount these challenges, BiH must address internal divisions, foster inclusive governance mechanisms and balance external supervision and internal autonomy. In shedding light on how contested statehood influences the EU’s role and policies, the article discusses the concept of ‘complex sovereignty’, particularly relevant to BiH’s context.

A new multipolar order: combined development, state forms and new business classes

Abstract What are the key social forces and interests that underpin an emerging multipolar world? Existing research oscillates between the retreat of the liberal international order and the rise of the rest, which remains trapped in a form of geopolitical fetishism. These explanations tell us little about the kinds of forces that are driving a more fragmented and disordered global order. In this article, we suggest going beyond this by fleshing out the underlying social class relations that this new emerging order is based on. At the core of it is the emergence of a new business class—fraction of capital—that in turn sustains what we call competing regulatory geographies. The latter are internalized within state institutions and policies and have reconsolidated a combination of state and market-led industrial policy. Empirically, we also show how these dynamics unfold in key non-core states. In highlighting this particularly potent dynamic of the contemporary global order, this article calls for policy-makers to better recognize the internal contestation within states that shapes and is shaped by combined capitalist development.

From dematerialising race to distorting decoloniality: development-as-imperialism and Hindu supremacy

This article explores how race in international development currently operates globally. It is not simply a discursive legacy of colonialism but also inextricably embedded in contemporary processes of imperialist extraction and accumulation, which the architecture of development both legitimises and extends. The article argues for deeper engagement with Marxist thinkers located in the Global South in contemporary theorisations of race in development. In the context of multiple anti-racist and decolonial movements globally, many mainstream development actors are claiming to engage with questions of racism within their organisations. This is explored through an analysis of several texts produced by the British Overseas Network for Development (Bond), a large network of organisations working on international development in Britain, in response to the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement since 2020. While contradictions within these texts evidently reflect internal contestations over understandings of racism and anti-racism, they ultimately propose the adoption of diversity-based ‘solutions’ to racism and coloniality in development. These are analysed in the context of a long line of initiatives to relegitimise colonialism and development in order to sustain racialised structures of global capital accumulation. The essentialisation inherent in these approaches facilitates the appropriation of notions of decoloniality by forces of Brahmanical Hindu supremacism in India, which are closely tied to racialised and racialising global corporate capital. The second part of the article explores these processes, highlights the synergies between anti-caste and anti-racist thinking about capital and labour, and argues that Hindu supremacism incorporates, is sustained and strengthened by, and in turn feeds global supremacist ideologies.

Sports as placemaking: critical reflections on a community-engaged campaign

ABSTRACT Community-engaged scholarship has largely neglected the potential of sports to construct progressive forms of community and mobilize disparate interests. In this article, we critically reflect on how sports were used for placemaking purposes in the Friendship and Hope Campaign, an annual event that is driven by residents of Thembelihle, a low-income community in South Africa. The Campaign is a participatory and community-based intervention that seeks to strengthen community relations and mobilize resources to build peaceful, nonracial, and nonsexist communities. Although the Campaign hosted several sports tournaments and cultural events, its attempt to strengthen community cohesion for the purposes of making democratically-led change renders it a political approach to placemaking. Yet, as with all community-engaged work, this was far from a simplistic process. The Campaign’s deployment of sports as a placemaking practice was complicated by a multitude of political interests that oftentimes contradicted the community-oriented values and aims of the Campaign. We reflect on how patronage politics can assist us in understanding such internal contestations and conflicting interests, and how community campaigns can work to move through and hold complexity in a democratic fashion, rather than attempt to settle such complexity altogether

Re-imagining EU Foreign and Security Policy in a Complex and Contested World

ABSTRACT The European Union (EU) increasingly formulates and implements foreign and security policy under the constraints of internal contestation, regional fragmentation and multipolar competition. While such contextual challenges can inhibit the EU from adopting an ambitious foreign and security policy, this Special Issue shows that the EU and its member states have developed ways of mitigating their impact. Through institutional, functional and diplomatic measures, the EU has managed to reduce the adverse effect of the contextual factors on its foreign and security policy towards conflicts and crises.

EU Policy towards the Israel-Palestine Conflict: The Limitations of Mitigation Strategies

ABSTRACT Over the decades, the EU has aimed at resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict through its Foreign and Security Policy (EUFSP) tools, with the ‘two-state solution’ as the over-arching principle for conflict resolution. This policy has been ineffective due to the contextual interplay of multipolar competition, regional fragmentation and EU-level internal contestation. Faced with these contextual constraints, the EU has employed a range of mitigation strategies: delegation as an institutional measure through its Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) missions; multilateralisation as a diplomatic/coalitional measure through its participation in the Quartet and other multilateral platforms; and selective engagement as a functional measure through its trade ties with both actors and humanitarian aid policies in order to mitigate the impact of the contextual constraints. However, none of the EU’s mitigation actions have adequately alleviated the impact of the three contextual constraints because of intra-regional sensitivities, divergences and violent clashes, as well as Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestinian lands with the protection of the United States (US).

Transnationalising Farming Protest to Avoid Marginalisation? COPA and the Mansholt Plan

Drawing on extensive multi-archival and multi-institutional research, the article explores how the Committee of Professional Agricultural Organisations (COPA) responded to the multiple challenges presented by the Memorandum ‘Agriculture’ between 1968 and 1972. At this critical juncture, COPA had to show its ability to unite and mobilise Community farmers against the Commission’s first major reform of the Common Agricultural Policy. The article demonstrates that the transnationalisation of farm protests, which culminated in the March 1971 demonstration, was the result of COPA’s attempt to avert marginalisation and address internal contestation by its member organisations. The article also sheds light on the internal, structural, and ideological factors behind the gradual deterioration of the close COPA-Commission alliance, which forced COPA to supplement its traditional insider lobbying strategy with transnational grassroots mobilisation leading up to the March 1971 protests.

“Islam Is My Washing Line”

Abstract Although conversion is an ongoing religious journey, it is rarely studied as such. This article provides a longitudinal study of conversion to Islam by Dutch women. People who recently convert might firmly hold on to their new convictions, not providing space for doubts and uncertainty, whereas studying the long-term process also gives insights into moments of weak belief, doubts, and ambivalence, or growing faith and spirituality. Not only these internal contestations are important to examine, also the context of the conversion narrative can change over time. Conversion is a contested issue, yet which aspects of the conversion are contested can shift due to societal debates on Islam. This article conceptualizes the conversion experience as a contextual narrative of the ongoing religious transformation of the ‘self’ in relation to different ‘others’ over time.

“Something for everyone”: Ownership as a moving target in Swedish and British regional foreign aid to Africa

SummaryMotivationRegionalism in Africa is to a large extent financed from the outside, which has given rise to a deep‐seated ownership problem. African actors and donors struggle with whether the ownership deficit derives from unequal donor–recipient relationships or recipient‐related weaknesses. This study goes beyond these debates and adds new insights by exploring the preconceived notions, ideas, and practices of ownership within the donor agencies themselves.PurposeThe article explores the ownership of regional foreign aid to Africa through three generic questions: what is meant by “ownership” in a regional setting?; who are the “owners”?; and what strategies and activities are enacted to ensure ownership of regional foreign aid?Methods and approachThe study is based on a paired comparison of Sweden and the United Kingdom. While both are large donors of regional aid to Africa, they have diverging approaches to ownership. The empirical material consists of official regional strategies, internal planning documents, aid evaluations and more than 20 semi‐structured interviews with Swedish and British officials based both in headquarters and in field offices.FindingsThe meanings and principles, considerations about “owners,” as well as strategies and activities to strengthen ownership frequently change over time and for different actors. In both Sweden and the UK, ownership means different things to different officials. Internal contestations between top‐level and field‐based officials reinforce the ambiguities and contradictions within each donor agency. Contrary to expectations, there is more diversity within the Swedish aid machinery than in the British.Policy implicationsIn contrast to the widespread belief among both donors and African‐based actors that the ownership problem results from asymmetric donor–recipient relationships and/or weak African commitment to regional integration, the study shows that policy‐makers need to shift their attention towards the goals, strategies, and internal practices within donor agencies themselves.

THE CONTROVERSY OVER SAMPRADAYA AND THE DYNAMICS OF HINDU INSTITUTION: CONTESTATION OF HINDU ELITES IN PALANGKA RAYA CITY

This article is intended to analyze the controversy over sampradaya and the dynamics of Hindu institutions in general and ‘The Indonesia Administrative Council of Hindu Dharma’ Parisada Hindu Dharma Indonesia (PHDI) in particular in Palangka Raya City. The existence of sampradaya, as a transnational organization, has triggered an internal contestation among the Hindu elites. Being a qualitative study, this current study applies the approach of cultural studies, and emphasizes the different ways of interpreting one phenomenon. The data were obtained from the informants purposively chosen; therefore, they are categorized as the primary data source. The secondary data were obtained from the online and offline books available in the library, documents, articles and research results. The data were analyzed interactively in which Milles and Huberman were referred to. The data analysis includes the data reduction, the data presentation, the conclusion withdrawal or the data verification and interpretation. The results and discussion show that the controversy and contestation more dominantly result from the impact of globalization indicated by the dialectic process of affecting each other between the particularity referring to the symbols of the Bali Hindu identity, as one of the Hindu identities in Indonesia which is obliged to be maintained, and the universality, as the Hindu identity referring to the Indian culture, whose followers have spread all over the world.
 Keywords: sampradaya, PHDI, elite, Bali Hindu

The UNESCO Memory of the World Programme and claims for recognition of atrocities: The nominations of Documents of Nanjing Massacre and Voices of the ‘Comfort Women’

This article explores the use of the UNESCO Memory of the World programme in claims for recognition of atrocities, focusing on two recent nominations: Documents of Nanjing Massacre and Voices of the ‘Comfort Women’. We argue that amid domestic and international contestation of memories and historical accounts, cultural programmes, such as the Memory of the World, have become increasingly politicised and used to push for international recognition of past atrocities. The article reflects on the character of the Memory of the World programme and the core reasons for nominations to such programmes. It also considers the possible consequences of registration as it transposes the heritage of memory from the local to the global stage (and back) and in the process subjects both memory and heritage to various forms of authorised transformation and reification. We bring attention to how official recognition by the Memory of the World affects ongoing collective memory formation, and express concerns about the appropriation of individual and local memories, as they are granted universal value.

Two Responsibilities to Protect

The purpose of this paper is to re-theorize the evolution of the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) in the UN through to 2011, the apogee of liberal interventionism in the post-Cold War period. Contrary to a common argument in existing literature, and notwithstanding the adoption of the concept as an annual agenda item of the General Assembly, international contestation is not about implementation as neatly separated from meaning, but rather definition or interpretation. To better understand the boundaries of intergovernmental understanding, we need to interrogate the language or terms of the debate, particularly the ways in which those terms have been practiced. There have been two Responsibilities to Protect in international society. A discursive practice called Southern RtoP, traced through UN-based political dialogue, contests a meaning that has been prevalent for 20 years at least: that of Northern RtoP. This article shows evaluative nuance and data from the perspective of the Global South and provides a discursive history of an ongoing non-aligned protest against a NATO-associated theory of defeasible sovereignty. Deux responsabilités de protéger

THE ASSEMBLAGE OF INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE AND TOURISM

The touristic place provides discourses that are worth examining as to which how the management of the site, its internal contestation and development, as well as experiences of its visitors. Examining a heritage of the ancient Majapahit kingdom in Java, this article discusses the assemblage of tourism and religious sites and the extent the site serves as a reservoir for interreligious dialog in contemporary Indonesia. It tries to point out how interreligious dialogue is at work in this site and how surrounding communities participate and respond to the perseverance of the site. Finally, accentuating Swidler’s theory of dialogues, this paper looks at the practice of interreligious dialogue at a touristic site and how religious harmony is negotiated by Buddhist and Muslim through the site and the construction of “the other” by both religious communities.

Designing internal innovation contests

Innovation contests within firms offer the potential to tap latent employee expertise across the organization and expand innovation beyond the core R&D teams. Still, firms undertaking an internal contest, unlike the more commonly studied external contests, incur significant opportunity costs when employees divert their efforts toward the contest (and away from their routine work). Managing this key challenge forms the focus of the current study, with the overarching question being How should firms design internal contests? Motivated by fieldwork in electronics companies, we develop an application‐driven model that explicitly captures the fundamental trade‐off between incurring greater opportunity cost (of lost routine work) and increasing participation and contest effort. Analysis of our model demonstrates that for problem types that do not need significant effort for solution generation, the optimal contest reward is non‐monotonic in both the problem uncertainty and the wage rate of the participating employees. In case of more complex problems that require contestants to exert some minimal effort, the firm uses the reward decision to restrict participation and to ensure that contestants exert the required effort. In this case, the optimal reward increases with problem uncertainty, thereby incentivizing more contestants to enter. While the firm can attempt to mitigate the loss due to opportunity costs by organizing internal contests during employee leisure time, we identify conditions under which it is still optimal to organize these contests during working hours.

Antagonistic Cooperation: Factional Competition in the Shadow of Elections

AbstractIntra‐party competition is widespread and affects political parties' strength. This article presents a model of elections in which intra‐party factions can devote resources to campaigning for the party or undermining competing factions to obtain more power. The model shows that inter‐ and intra‐party competition are substitutes: Internal competition increases when the electoral stakes are low – for example, in consensus democracies granting power to losing parties – because the incentives to focus on the fight for internal power increase. Similarly, an increase in party polarization incentivizes factions to campaign to avoid a more costly electoral loss. Factions in the moderate party campaign more than those in the extreme party; conversely, when factions in the same party are ideologically divided, extreme factions campaign more. Finally, the model studies how internal rules affect intra‐party competition, showing how parties design internal contests among factions to maximize campaigning.

American Creationism, Creation Science, and Intelligent Design in the Evangelical Market by Benjamin L. Huskinson

Reviewed by: American Creationism, Creation Science, and Intelligent Design in the Evangelical Market by Benjamin L. Huskinson Caroline Matas Benjamin L. Huskinson, American Creationism, Creation Science, and Intelligent Design in the Evangelical Market (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) Benjamin L. Huskinson’s American Creationism, Creation Science, and Intelligent Design in the Evangelical Market is a book that challenges dominant narratives about American creationism and the American evangelicals who have popularized it. Part historical corrective, part contemporary analysis, the book argues that “American creationism” is actually a wide tent encompassing four distinct historical “waves,” plenty of internal contestation, and a vast array of aims and methods. Huskinson focuses on the latter two waves, from the 1960s to the present, tracking the consolidation of American creationism toward a few powerhouse organizations like the creation science group Answers in Genesis and the intelligent design-focused Discovery Institute. This ironic example of survival of the fittest, Huskinson contends, is best understood through the lens of evangelicalism not as a homogenous subculture but rather as a market demographic for whose market shares the differing strains of American creationist organizations compete. Huskinson explores what the current “winners” of a decades-long battle over creationist orthodoxy (and the authority to define that orthodoxy) can tell us about the social and political functions anti-evolution beliefs play in the United States. The contemporary dominance of Answers in Genesis-style fundamentalist [End Page 141] creationism serves a powerful oppositional social function, Huskinson writes, as the group identifies humans as the unique pinnacle of God’s creation and characterizes all who oppose this belief as hostile to God and Christians alike. One of Huskinson’s chief contributions in this book is the case he makes for the diversity of theologies, aims, and tactics among various types of “anti-evolutionists.” While young earth, day-age, gap theory, and intelligent design creationists certainly share some overlapping traits—namely their approach to scientific inquiry with an a priori assumption of God’s involvement in creation— Huskinson sees creation science and intelligent design organizations performing different roles in American public life. Creation science groups, based in a fundamentalist reading of Genesis and invested in “proving” the historicity of biblical events like Noah’s flood, have tended toward more populist, accessible, and entertainment-oriented content with the aim of not just “opposing evolution, but…policing community boundaries within accepted theological parameters” (154). Meanwhile, intelligent design organizations, Huskinson claims, have largely served a political function of opposing the primacy of evolutionary theory in the US education system on behalf of creationists and non-creationists alike. The benefit of separating out these strands of anti-evolutionist sentiment is not just greater accuracy in describing the landscape of American evangelicalism, but also identifying the different niches they fill in the evangelical marketplace of ideas. While Huskinson might occasionally overstate the differences between and within these groups—for example, distinguishing between “theological creationists” and “creation science proponents” strikes me as an exercise in futility— he reminds scholars of American religion to take great care in identifying the divergent theological and epistemological underpinnings that motivate seemingly similar groups. The model of American evangelicalism as a marketplace of ideas, while not distinctive to Huskinson, serves as a useful approach to making sense of the “products” various creationist groups offer consumers as they compete for dwindling market shares. Huskinson theorizes that an upward trend in donations to Answers in Genesis, the Institute for Creation Research, and the Discovery Institute over the past few decades represents not a widening consumer base but a consolidation toward fewer and larger creationist organizations—a consolidation Huskinson attributes to these groups’ savvy marketing and fundraising efforts. In something of a reversal of the Scopes trial, the creationist groups that have survived and thrived in the twenty-first century have been those fighting their battles in the court of public opinion rather than the American judiciary. For all their differences, these three organizations are alike in their use of “oppositional frameworks” that mobilize donors around a shared sense of grievance against the “Goliath” of evolutionary theory and its attendant social ills (189–190). Answers [End Page 142] in Genesis—by far the highest-earning creationist organization in the...

Single candidate and the dynamics of 2020 Indonesian Simultaneous Election: A perspective on internal contestation

This paper describes the development of local-level democracy in implementing the 2020 Regional Head Simultaneously related to a single candidate and dynastic politics. In this research, we found that the phenomenon of single candidates and political dynasties, which shows the climate of democracy at the local level, is increasingly unhealthy. Indonesia is experiencing democratic backsliding. Political dynasties and single candidates have, of course, hurt democracy. Regional Head is no longer an effective means of participation and competition as a condition for the running of democracy. Regional Head also did not produce elite circulation. On the other hand, the oligarchy is a node on a political dynasty and local bossism. The theoretical perspectives used in the research to explain single candidates and political dynasties are democracy, election, oligarchy, and local bossism.

Conceptualising the historical tradition of radical workers’ education in South Africa

ABSTRACT This article sketches the contours of the particular tradition of radical workers’ education that emerged in South Africa in the context of the re-emergence of militant trade unionism in the 1970s and 1980s. It draws methodologically on Cultural Historical Activity Theory and its view of education as an activity system to present an analysis of the some of the distinctive features of this tradition of radical workers’ education. These include its transformative purpose, its internal ideological contestation, and the combination of an ideologically directive pedagogy with learning in “praxis.” Contextual conditions that supported the emergence of this radical tradition have shifted in more recent times, undermining its historical practices. The article concludes that recognising and reclaiming this radical tradition can enrich our knowledge archive and our education practices.

A guilty pleasure: The legal, social scientific and feminist verdict against rap

This article draws on governance theory, critical theory and cultural criminology to interrogate how legal, social scientific and feminist discourses converge to construct rap music as a pressing social problem. While each discourse has its own preoccupations, ideologies and internal contestation, the overarching message is that rap music is a potential source of danger that conveys anti-social attitudes. Suspicion is sometimes also cast on musicians themselves. While I compare three overlapping fields, the ultimate purpose is to problematize the supposedly progressive approach to interpreting and mobilizing against songs deemed harmful. Significantly, I argue that much of the social science scholarship and feminist activism that addresses hip hop music perpetuates anti-Black stereotypes and dovetails with repressive state apparatuses. Among other things, social science and feminist criticism of rap hermeneutically support the use of rap lyrics as evidence of criminality—a distinctly non-progressive, racialized legal practice.